Get That Out of Your Mouth #23

Everyone gets crazy ideas. Like Jon Nolan, who was driving with Dave Karlotski, when they got to talking about the February Album Writing Month Challenge, a take-off on that "write a novel in a month" project. Nolan heard about it from Andrew Grimm, a friend who completed the project. "I have the record that he took a year and $10k to make, and then I have his FAWM record that he recorded on a piece-of-crap 4-track, and it was just really good," Nolan explains. "I listened to this record and I thought, 'This is great. Wouldn't it be awesome if we could get everybody in New Hampshire to do FAWM?'"

Anyone who's ever tried to make anything, from a screenplay to an opera to a fancy desert, knows how many psychological blocks can get in the way of starting or finishing a project-- and that's why the "make something in a month" concept is such an ingenious trick. The offer's hard to turn down, because the expectations start so low: nobody's asking you to make your masterpiece, since you only have a month. Then you get going, and you take it more and more seriously-- but before you can defeat yourself or let the anxiety take over, you remember again: It's only one month. It doesn't have to be Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska. (But hey-- maybe it will be.)

"[There's] a number of stumbling blocks, be they money, because you want to record in a real studio so you'll be taken seriously," says Nolan. "[Or] it's just hard to feel inspired by anything you're coming up with, and it's not necessarily fear that's stopping you-- you're just underwhelmed by your own whatever. But you just gotta keep your feet moving and push through it...You take away the studio problem and you say, 'I got a boombox.' Become a boombox motherfucker. Record the best album you can on an 80s boombox."

So Nolan threw the idea out to the guys in his band, and some friends, and finally to Karlotski. If Nolan weren't a hub of the music scene-- as veteran of seminal New Hampshire band Say Zuzu, one-time booker of the legendary Stone Church, and music editor for The Wire alt-weekly newspaper-- he probably would have forgotten about it. And if Karlotski weren't publisher of The Wire, a paper that gets by in a small town by supporting the arts community, sponsoring concerts, and printing sampler CDs of local bands and gluing them by hand with sticky dots to the front of 10,000 newspapers every once in a while-- just to get the word out-- he probably wouldn't have done shit, either. (Full disclosure: I contribute as a freelancer for The Wire.)

But they did have a newspaper, and connections, and friends in bands. So they got worked up enough to bring in Wire editor Karen Marzloff and contributor and musician Chris Greiner as the core group that would make it happen. And finally, in January they launched a challenge-- not a competition, 'cause nobody was "the winner," but an event to spur bands to make records. Calling it the RPM Challenge, they announced that bands could take part by signing up on a website, and writing and recording a 10-song, 35-minute album, due by noon on March 1. And if you did that, you won.

The challenge took its inspiration and most of its rules from FAWM, but it called for 10 songs instead of 14-- and the bands had to record them. The Wire took sign-ups at the website, www.rpmchallenge.com, and announced a kick-off meeting for participants. Nolan personally badgered his friends: "One of my responsibilities early on was to go and make sure we had at least 10 people who were absolutely going to come through for us. In my head I was thinking, we quite possibly could have 30 albums if we really hit it out of the park."

By January 20, 35 bands had signed up. But at the January 26 kickoff, held in the basement lounge of the Muddy River Smokehouse, over one hundred musicians milled around with free wings in one hand and a beer in the other, talking about their project ideas.

"You have made history, honest to God!" Karlotski told the crowd during his brief remarks. Or as Nolan put it, "There's a fucking music community here!" Karlotski and Nolan explained the Challenge and took some logistical questions, but more than anything, they came to cheerlead. Nolan asked the crowd to dream of the album they would make if they didn't care who heard it. "Don't wimp out! You have nothing to lose. You don't have to let a soul listen to it," he promised. "Throw yourself into this album with reckless abandon."

The crowd wasn't diverse-- I'd estimate it was roughly 95% white dudes-- but their ideas were all over the map, and so were their reasons for signing up. To some people, it was just a one-off; Josh Cyr, who works at Savvy Software and has barely touched his sax in years, planned to dust off his horn and cut a record of solo improvisations. For others it was therapy. Keyboardist Keith Sabella was recovering from a recent trauma: He accidentally deleted two years' worth of work from his keyboard. Since then, he hadn't even been able to look at his instrument, until he heard about the RPM Challenge. "I see it as an opportunity to come up with something new," he explained, with inspired calm.

The meeting even drew bands from beyond the Seacoast. Scalawag, a Manchester rock band "along the lines of Los Lobos or Bruce Springsteen," were already in the middle of recording an album, but the material dated back as far as three years; as Scalawag Peter Gustafson explained, "Hopefully, with these [new] tunes, we'll catch that early moment when a song is newborn, when it's catching its first breath."

And Jodie Curtis of Amesbury, Mass., brought 20 years of experience writing lyrics and songs for artists from the Seacoast's T. S. Baker and Stan Moeller to Caroline Horn and Jimmy Landry. But aside from joining the choir as a kid, Curtis had never sung professionally-- until now. "It may be terrible and it may be great," said Curtis, "but you just have to be unafraid. Just jump."

/ / /

February 1 came, and the participants-- who now numbered 220-- took to the website, swapping ideas and peer pressure in the forums or posting updates on their artist pages. The Wire ran weekly updates, and spent so much time registering artists and maintaining the site that as Marzloff relayed, "It was like we had started a whole other business by accident." And Nolan kept pinning people down and asking, "'How come you aren't doing an RPM album?' It's like the crane maneuver in Karate Kid. Done properly there is no defense. You can't come up with a good excuse not to do it."

Thanks to home recording gear, four-tracks, friends who owned studios, or Apple's GarageBand software, most of the people either had the means to make a record or bought new tools and learned how to use them. A few bands hooked up with friends or found help through the website, which became the central virtual meeting place for the project, and some of the same names cropped up again and again in multiple projects as performers or engineers. And the clubs and open mic nights around town were packed with people trying out new material; on one night in the middle of February, you could have seen a full set of RPM Challengers at the Red Door, and then walked around the corner to the Press Room to catch even more.

A few bands got off easy: Blue Matter wrapped it up as early as February 11 by taping their new songs at a gig. Others kept the scope manageable, giving themselves one or two days to record, or deciding they would play the new songs at a gig, tape it, and submit that-- no matter how it turned out.

Other people finished a record without playing a note. Some people made albums using nothing but samples and GarageBand. The 10010010 album was created entirely from music-generating software. And John Herman and Joseph K. Murphy enlisted help from around the world to record their album: as Herman describes on his site, they coordinated a global project where the duo joined members of The Sars and Italy's Turnpike Glow to record songs "based on beats per minute, key, and thematic words we gave them."

But most of the bands spent days and nights writing, jamming, and recording. And while you'd expect people who are up against a deadline to stick to what they know, many bands surprised themselves. "We went in writing for this in a whole new way from what we normally do, and we just literally attacked it like animals," said Rick Chambers of the Cold War Spies, about halfway through the month. A darkwave (dark new wave) band that had played together for a year-and-a-half, Cold War Spies set out to cut their debut album. "People brought ideas to the table [and said], 'I've been sitting on this for a while.'...Gabe Price, our bass player, he was holding out on us. We heard two of these bass lines he wrote and we were like, 'My God, where have these been?' 'I was just sitting on them. I thought that they were a little too out there to bring to the table.' 'No dude, these are genius!'"

Chambers works at the local Daddy's Junky Music, "and I get to talk to everybody, and there are so many people doing this thing in this area, it's crazy," he says. "With the exception of a few bands, everybody's doing this thing. Everybody's pulled together. It's been really cool for the community around here, because everybody's talking about it, sharing idea, and sharing equipment."

But as the four weeks of February drew to a close, artists started to scramble. Traffic dropped off at the website as bands got too busy to post-- or possibly, started to drop out.

Jeremy LeClair was one of many artists who finished his album the night before it was due. LeClair, who plays in several bands including the stunning skronk/improv duo Plasmids & Phages, wrote a chance-based composition titled "Month", with five musicians playing 28 segments that last exactly 90 seconds apiece. After rehearsing and revising it for a month, he nailed it in one take on the night of the 28th. "We all felt great about the performance; it really is a terribly nervewracking piece to play," said LeClair. "Set the tape rolling and you know you are just committed to this thing for the next 45 minutes. All in all, I don't think at this point we could've played it any better."

And Chris Greiner, of Northern and Torrez, stayed up all night recording and mixing his entire album. "I wrote a song at 5:30 this morning called 'Nine Tracks is Not Enough'," said Greiner on March 1, the date the projects were due. "It's me harmonizing with myself five times saying, 'Nine tracks is not enough.' When I listened to it at 10 o'clock it just sounded too silly. But I was on the verge of including that."

/ / /

By Sunday, 13 discs had come to The Wire's office; by Monday, the count reached 25; on Tuesday, February 28, they had 64. With the deadline coming the next day at noon, they figured they had a respectable showing.

And then came the deluge. As Marzloff recalls, a procession of people came through the office Wednesday, including one frazzled artist who shouted, "You BETTER listen to this!" The stacks piled up on a fold-out table in the office, each one with a handmade cover and a post-it bearing its number. And these weren't quickie throwaway projects: many came with handbound liner notes. Optic Rose wrote an entire children's book and submitted it with two CDs and a video on DVD. Even Big Tits' Greatest Hits had a nice cover.

When they locked the office door and went home on Wednesday, the total hit 165-- an astounding 75% success rate. By comparison, over at FAWM, only 72 of the 371 registrants finished the project. So how did a small music scene in southern New Hampshire beat them? Most likely, it's because running a challenge like this is easier in a tight-knit community. If you were a musician near Portsmouth, New Hampshire, you couldn't get away from the RPM Challenge this February. The community, the support, and best of all, the peer pressure kept everyone engaged. It gave the early starters an audience, and pushed the last-minute finishers to do whatever they could not to be left behind.

And the seacoast got more than 165 new discs. Everyone who did the Challenge has more gear, more connections, and more skills. Lifelong musicians from this corner of New Hampshire met each other for the first time. And it coaxed albums out of people who never would have recorded one otherwise. Greiner guesses that a ballpark 5-10% of the submissions came from people who wouldn't describe themselves as musicians. "This inspired the musician in a lot of people."

Everybody I'd met at the kick-off meeting handed in a record, and from what I could tell they all showed up at the giant listening party, an all-night bash that started in the Music Hall theater and spread out to four bars around Portsmouth. And right at the front of the Music Hall, on a line of tables in front of the stage, sat all of the CDs-- each one handmade and hand-designed, with photocopied images, in-jokes, dirty jokes, shots of local beaches and bridges, people's faces, or sometimes just a title scrawled onto a CD-R. As Marzloff put it, going over the numbers and the percentages didn't tell you what happened: You got it from looking at that swath of CDs. Each one had its own crazy story-- and best of all, each one was done.